Absolutely! Our students in the HIP run the gamut from utter novice ("This is new and exciting territory!") to experienced health care practitioner ("I know my diagnostics, but I don't have a solid botanical materia medica") to seasoned naturalist ("I can identify these plants, but can they be used for anything?") to lifelong gardener ("Please just give me a reason to love these dandelions!"). We will tell you what we mean when we talk about infusions, tinctures, monoecious plants, and mucilaginous extracts. We're available for questions, and you'll find that your fellow students are also an amazing resource, too.

Good question. The answer? A lot! Our approach to learning herbalism is special: With our hands-on medicine making, you’ll gain confidence to create your own high-quality remedies while building your apothecary. With our abundant time in the field, you’ll grow a familiarity with and connection to the Pacific Northwest ecologies that we live in. With our engaging approach to botany and mycology, you’ll come out of the program understanding how to identify plants and mushrooms using keys and how to recognize plant families. With our herbal-actions-based approach to learning about medicinal plants, you’ll gain a thorough understanding of the principles behind using particular herbs, and you’ll get the hang of how to formulate successfully. Our herbal games, plant walks, and interactive style all help with deepening and retaining the knowledge that you have. Our focus on sustainability and stewardship will help inform your own ethical lens.

Learn from at least a few different plant medicine lovers, and we guarantee that you'll be a better herbalist for it. We welcome intermediate students in our introductory classes, our Herbal Immersion Program, and our intermediate offerings.

We’re not offering that this year, but we’re excited to do so in the future. If you have a group of intermediate herbalists who are ready to take this class, please reach out and we can craft a course and schedule that works for your cohort.

There are a lot of herbalism schools in North America that boast about offering herbal certification. Herbalism is unlicensed and unregulated in the United States; there’s no legal certification or licensure for herbalists. We like to be transparent with our students about that! However, we offer a certificate of completion for our Herbal Immersion Program as a token of the time and effort that you’ve put into your studies. We’re proud of everyone who completes our program!

Alumni who want to use their herbal and botanical skills to get a job or to study with other schools are always welcome to ask us for a letter of reference. Our description of what our 250-hour course covers, and what your strengths were as a student, will inform people much better than a certificate could.

Missy and Gradey started teaching together as Arctos in 2006, offering workshops and medicinal plant hikes. In 2007, the Herbalism & Ecosystems program, a joint venture between both Gradey and Missy, began. A decade later, Missy expanded that course to become the Herbal Immersion Program. Gradey remains teaching as a cherished part of the Herbal Immersion Program, but since 2023 has turned his primary focus to his Medicine Garden nursery.

Before we started the Arctos School, both of us had a fair amount of teaching, facilitating, and training under our belts. 

Arctos programs are about conveying pragmatic skills with the goals of connecting people with the land, connecting people with their community/ies, and improving community resilience. These pragmatic skills can be put to use in everyday life: ethical wildcrafting/weedcrafting for food and medicine; home medicine-making; cultivating plants and using weeds; practicing medic skills and using herbs for first aid. Our classes stress a sustainability-centered, reciprocity-based, thoughtful approach to harvesting wild plants and an enthusiastic endorsement of using common weeds as plant allies. We wear our beliefs on our sleeves, and we want to change the world. But we aren't the gatekeepers of transformational knowledge; we want to facilitate a collaborative process to create learning.

We encourage studying with different plant medicine teachers; an herbal education is never complete, and a broad base of knowledge benefits us all. Even learning the 'basics' of nettles or calendula with different instructors will, for attentive students, yield further knowledge and even greater questions. You’re welcome to study with us if you’ve already learned from other herbalists, and we support our alumni in furthering their learning at other herbalism schools — or in massage programs, aromatherapy apprenticeships, naturopathic colleges, and other connected-but-different modalities!

Collaborative, honest, and straightforward. We're here to guide the process, bring ideas to the table, and keep things moving.

The interview is an informal one-on-one meeting. Don't worry about dressing up, preparing a résumé, or rehearsing a speech! I just want to outline the expectations of students, answer your questions about the program, and make sure that we're a good fit. Spoiler alert: Participation, attendance, and commitment are important.

Arctos always encourages students to learn from each other. If you miss a class, please catch up on the material covered with another student in the program before the next time the class meets. That could look like: your classmate leading a plant walk for you; reading your classmate's notes; coming up with a Q&A session with your classmate; making medicine together; and more. This facilitates community-building between herbalism students and also enhances learning opportunities for those willing to pass along knowledge to fellow plant lovers. Missy will gladly answer any questions remaining after that connection, and is available for private tutorial sessions if needed (rates discounted for current students).

We are always open to proposals for partial trade. If you or someone on your behalf has a professional skill or resources that you’d like to trade, please approach us with a specific proposal, and we will let you know if that is a service or item that we could use at this time. You’re welcome to pitch anything you have to offer: carpentry, bodywork, class rental space, housecleaning, CSA shares, graphic design, videography, raw honey, landscaping, vacation rental stays, etc. When we accept trade, it’s typically for 20-50% of the cost of a program, or up to full cost of a one-day offering, with the remainder paid with money.

As a tiny school, Arctos do not typically have work-study positions. If we are looking for a work-study student, it will be listed in the individual program description or posted on Arctos’s facebook page and instagram account.

Arctos is a place-based school, centered in and around Portland, Oregon. Almost all of our teaching is in-person, both outdoors and indoors, because we personally cherish hands-on learning and face-to-face interaction. Harm-reduction protocols, such as outdoor classes, excellent indoor air filtration, and improved air circulation are employed for all classes. Masks are always welcome in Arctos classes, and up-to-date vaccinations for flu, covid, and other contagious illnesses are highly encouraged.

We recognize that online learning is a valuable tool as well. The pandemic inspired us to offer online classes, and occasionally we have offerings via zoom. When we meet online, our goals remain the same: To engage students in interactive, participatory, and experiential learning.